Wednesday, May 18, 2011

These jars show the color of the syrup from our four major boils, from left to right. Typically, as the season progresses the syrup gets darker. This year our second boil was lighter then the first round, but then darkened with each successive round

Our sugaring season was a good one and wrapped up around mid-April. We made a record 12 gallons of syrup. Our previous largest take was something like 8 gallons, so we were quite pleased. I think this happened for three reasons: an abundant supply of sap, the addition of 3 or 4 great producing trees and a refined approach to boiling. Having enough sap is clearly the first requirement to being able to produce a bunch of syrup and those extra trees have been a great addition to our sugarbush, bringing our number of taps up around 35-40.

We've also gotten better at just keeping the boiling process going for as many days as needed, rather then trying to do marathon full boils late into the night. We've taken more of a "boil-as-you-go" approach and it allows us to be busy with other things while we try to keep things moving along with the boil.

You can roughly expect a quart of finished syrup for each tap and it takes roughly 40 gallons of sap to produce a gallon of syrup.